Light and Colour

One of the last important private collections: the complete Rudolf Strasser Collection of glass will be on show to the public for the first time. On March 1st 2002, the exhibition Light and Colour. Decorated Glass will open at the Kunsthistorisches Museum where it will be on show until June 1st.

Numbering over 400 objects today, the collection was assembled by Professor Strasser in over fifty years of dedicated collecting. In 1989, an extensive catalogue dealing with a large part of the collection and including a comprehensive survey of the history of the art of glass was published (Rudolf von Strasser - Walter Spiegl, Dekoriertes Glas, Munich 1989). It has long been out of print. Since then, over sixty important glass objects have been added to the collection. For this new exhibition, a revised catalogue of the whole collection will be published. This has meant that parts of the collection had to be restructured in terms of content and chronological order. Results of scholarly research on individual glasses or groups of glasses carried out since the first publication of the catalogue have been incorporated into the new edition. The book‘s authors, the collector himself and Sabine Baumgärtner, aim to provide a seminal work that will help solve many of the still unanswered questions on the interesting and difficult topic of the history of glass.

The Renaissance is one of the main areas of interest for this collection, the period when the art of Venetian glassmakers aroused the interest of central European princes open to the new cultural current of the Renaissance and humanism. The Willkhumb from Petronell, presented by Professor Strasser to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1999, will also be included in the exhibition. It was probably a gift from Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, to the owner of the castle of Petronell, Johannes von Kranichberg (1487), and it is, like the so-called Puchheim ciborium, an example of the increasingly close relationship painting, were founded in the Tyrol (at Hall and at Innsbruck). Several glasses from between the desire of Central European rulers for princely representation, and Venetian glassmakers that marked the 15th and 16th century. Fifty years later, important glass factories which decorated their wares by diamond incisions and cold painting, were founded in the Tyrol (at Hall and at Innsbruck). Several glasses from these Tyrolean Renaissance factories, or from the Rosenberg factory in southern Bohemia complete this part of the exhibition. Glasses decorated with enamel painting form an equally large part of the collection. They date back to the late Renaissance and mark the slow emergence of bourgeois artisans.

Bohemian, southern German and Saxon factories continue Venetian traditions and are represented in the show by numerous early tankards. Baroque glasses cut with a wheel form another focal point. Glass engraving, which developed from Renaissance stone cutting, was particularly popular at the court of Rudolf II. The collection contains a disk engraved by Kaspar Lehmann which - like the cylinder glass depicting the Judgement of Paris - was probably cut by Lehmann‘s pupil, Georg Schwanhardt the elder, and is one of the incunabula of the glass cutter‘s art.

The exhibition will highlight both the great 17th century Nuremberg engravers (Schwinger, Schmidt, Eder, Killinger and Mäuerl) and the important 18th century engravers from Silesia, Bohemia, Thuringia, Saxony and Potsdam: Schneider, the Master of the Koula Tankard, G. E. Kunkel, Kreutzburg, A. F.Sang, Samuel Schwartz, Martin Winter and Rossbach. The glasses by Friedrich Winter, marked by their high relief decoration developed from Renaissance stone cutting, impressively document the baroque art of living. Glass decorations in the Netherlands, one of the most important branches of Venetian glassmaking, is represented by works by famous masters: van Heemskerck, Mooleyser, Jakob Sang, Wolf etc.

Schwarzlotmalerei, practised at the beginning of the 18th century in Silesia and Bohemia primarily by Ignaz Preissler, is marked by works originally in the collection of his patron, prince Kolowrat, which makes them incunabula.

For the 19th century, works by the prominent creators of transparent painting, Kothgasser and Mohn, form the collection‘s focal point. Simm, Biemann, Pfohl and Zach, the important glass cutters of the Biedermeier and Post-Biedermeier period are also represented by important engravings.